ith all this tragedy over
me, with him--lying over there--he whom I suspected and blamed--don't
think ill of me; but my heart would have been broken but for you."

He drew her to him again, held her close to him, kissed her upturned
lips.

"I will leave too," he whispered. "I will come after. Will you promise
now?"

"Yes," she answered simply.

When he returned to the bank, Brennan rode up at a gallop.

"Oh, a terrible thing has happened!" he cried as he came into the
office. "Waroona Downs has been burned to the ground in the night and
both Mrs. Burke and old Patsy burned to death in their beds. I warned
her that one of these days that drunken old man would do some damage,
but she wouldn't listen to me. Now there's the place in ruins and ashes.
It must have burned out hours ago, for there's not a spark left, only
the remains of the two lying charred to cinders."

Coming on top of the other news circulating amongst the townsfolk, the
destruction of Waroona Downs, with its two inmates, exhausted the local
capacity for wonder.

The whole township followed Eustace from the bank, forgetting their
earlier condemnation of him now that his innocence had been declared,
and being only anxious to testify their sympathy with the woman who had
suffered so much in their midst. They would have turned out _en masse_
and escorted her some miles on her way to the junction when she set out
from Waroona for the south, but word was passed round that she wanted to
go away in silence, unobserved.

Three months later Harding followed her. There was no staying the
township then. He was the last of the active participants in the tragic
mystery to leave the place, and it was an open secret he was going to
join the one for whom they all felt deeply. So they made up in his
send-off for the restraint they had exercised upon themselves when she
bade the town a silent farewell.

The memory of that festivity still lives in the local annals, and ever,
as a stranger asks for the story of the Rider, the send-off of the
banker is the conclusion of the tale. In vain the stranger may ask for
particulars as to who the Rider was.

The charred ashes of Waroona Downs had no tongue wherewith to tell what
happened the night fire came to wipe the homestead from the earth.

WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD
PRINTERS PLYMOUTH

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Rider of Waroona, by Firth Scott

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